“I make up fantasy stories because my real life sucks. And now my fantasy life is starting to suck, too.”

“Sometimes I think that other people are reading my thoughts so I think to myself ‘stop reading my mind,’ just in case they are listening.”

“I know that sending in a stupid postcard to share a secret with a bunch of strangers won’t do a damn thing to change the daily loneliness and unhappiness in my life. And I sent this anyway.”

Here’s another article about PostSecret from The Telegraph of Calcutta, India. People from all over the world are sharing their secrets. Most of the comments at the bottom of the PostSecret page are positive, though one questions the weblog creator’s motivations.

A PostSecret traveling exhibit exists now; a stage production is in the works; a book surely will be published. But I don’t begrudge the creator, Frank, from publicizing the secrets beyond the Internet.

That’s what the people who sent in their secrets want: to not have them be secret anymore.

May 30, 2005

After poking some fun at my daughter, Celeste, for letting Laurel and me leave her panting breathlessly in our dust during a hike in L.A.’s Runyon Canyon, I’m pleased to report that Celeste redeemed her hiking-self yesterday.

She and husband Patrick flew up to spend what I had hoped would be a pleasant sunny Memorial Day weekend in Oregon. Pleasant it was; sunny it wasn’t. Nevertheless, we took them up to the Little North Santiam trail, guided by William Sullivan’s recently updated great book “100 Hikes in the Central Oregon Cascades.”

Though Celeste and Patrick had looked wonderfully fit and attractive standing on the Spring Lake dock near our home, I figured these admitted L.A. quasi-couch potatoes would find it hard to keep up with Laurel, me, and wonderdog Serena, avid Oregon outdoors people/canine that we are.

However, my view through most of the Little North Santiam hike was much like this: no sight of Patrick at all, who fell back into his fast-striding Aspen, Colorado hiking days as if he had never left the Rockies; a peek of Celeste’s back as she disappeared around a bend far ahead of me; and a closer view of Laurel, who, along with Serena, kept checking to see if I was still bringing up the rear (in my defense, I was carrying a pack with everybody’s lunch, which included four extremely dense peanut butter and jelly sandwiches plus a couple of gigantic Fuji apples).

When we stopped to appreciate what Sullivan calls the “little falls,” I was able to finally get a close-up look at Patrick and Celeste.

Then we were off again, past pristine Zen-like creeks cascading down to the river.

And through lush unspoiled old growth forest, which hopefully will forever remain so.

Celeste finally met her match (as I did) at the top of the steep switchbacks about two-thirds of the way to Three Pools, so we saved the end of the hike for another day. I reminisced with her about how nice it was to not have to carry her when she got tired, a fatherly memory from when she was three years old that is still fresh in my mind even though she’s thirty-three.

Even more fresh, though, is the memory of me now plodding along behind my daughter on the Little North Santiam trail, hoping that she won’t turn around and say, “Come on, Dad, you can’t be tired already. We just started walking!” She didn’t. But it would have been poetic justice if she had.

May 27, 2005

Before Laurel and I enter into our mellow yin Memorial Day weekend mood, it was balancing to experience some yang outrage this morning after reading a Statesman Journal story: “GOP sidesteps public on hunting bill.”

I’ve got to hand it to the Oregon House Republicans. It isn’t easy to score a triple outrage, but they managed to do it through an amendment to a bill that would let counties overturn statewide voter-approved restrictions on cougar and bear hunting. A House committee approved the bill without advance notice, undoubtedly because if environmental and animal-rights activists had known about this move ahead of time they would have expressed their own outrage to the committee members.

The AP article gave the legislators only an outrage double, saying “The move was controversial on two levels: For trying to bypass the will of voters and for sneaking the true meaning of the bill through the committee, thus avoiding public testimony.”

It is indeed outrageous for House Republicans to argue that the civil unions bill being considered by the legislature shouldn’t be approved because it goes against the will of Oregon voters who approved a ban on gay marriage, while they try to circumvent the will of Oregon voters who approved a ban on using bait to hunt bears and dogs to hunt cougars in 1994—and reaffirmed that decision in 1996, when a measure to repeal the law was rejected.

And it is doubly outrageous for House Republicans to get on their high horse about how government has to be more responsive to citizens, returning power to the people, when they obviously don’t give a rip about hearing public testimony concerning the loosening of bear and cougar hunting rules (the proposed law would allow county commissions to put a vote on the local ballot on whether to allow the practices that were banned statewide).

I’d add a third moral outrage to these legal and political outrages, which is how I justify awarding the House Republicans a triple. Rep. Patti Smith is reported to have said that cougars are growing so numerous, lawmakers have to put their concern for protecting human life ahead of their worries about voter backlash.

Even better, if she really wants to protect human life, would be for her to urge that taxes be increased so that cuts to the Oregon Health Plan could be rescinded. Lots of Oregonians are going to die because they don’t have adequate health care; I’ll be surprised if even one person dies in the next few years from a cougar attack.

Laurel and I live on ten rural acres. Cougars have been seen near us. We walk at night through forested areas. And we’re happy to co-exist with cougars. We don’t fear them, but we respect them.

Since cougars aren’t a genuine threat to humans, why are people so adamant about hunting them down? I believe that Rep. Smith and other cougarphobes are afraid of an animal capable of challenging Homo sapiens. They like to believe that humans have the right to do what they want with the natural world: pollute it, kill it, clear cut it, whatever we desire.

Cougars, bears, and wolves remind us that when we’re stripped down to our essential human selves—no firearm in hand—we’re no match for some of our fellow animals. They literally would rip us to shreds in a fair fight.

So I might support a bill that would allow hunting of cougars with dogs if the hunter had to kill the treed cougar with his bare hands—or maybe a knife, if we want to give humans a better chance. Let’s see how many brave hunters would take up the challenge. I’m willing to bet: very few. Likely, none.

People call hunting a “sport.” It isn’t. A sport is a contest. Killing an animal with a high-powered rifle from a hundred yards away is no contest. Shooting an animal with the aid of dogs or bait is even less of a contest. Voters recognized this when they passed the 1994 law. The House Republicans should have respected the moral will of the people.

May 25, 2005

Driving around in the car yesterday we heard a couple of talk show hosts, KEX’s Mark and Dave, tackle a pressing question: Is the new Carl’s Jr. “Spicy Burger” Paris Hilton ad soft-core pornography or savvy marketing?

Though we hadn’t seen the ad, we figured that if the Parent’s Television Council disapproved of it, we’d like it. And then—praise God!—last night the ad appeared while I was watching a recording of the final two-hour “24” episode.

After several watchings of a scantily-clad Paris Hilton washing a Bentley and chomping on a burger to the tune of “I love Paris in the spring time,” I concluded that a Victoria’s Secret ad is considerably more provocative. However, I’ll have to force myself to watch both of them few more times to be sure.

Which confirms the point made in a Business Week online article about the ad: if you don’t like something on television and want it to go away, ignore it. The more fuss you make about it—raunchy! sexually graphic!—the more you’ll drive people to see it.

It’s strange that the Parent’s Television Council is making such a fuss over the Carl’s Jr. ad, calling it “the ultimate example of corporate irresponsibility,” when I saw the ad while watching Fox’s “24.” Broadcast over the public airwaves, “24” is a great show. A violent great show.

Recently I’ve seen a man’s fingers broken one by one until he talked (first, he screamed). I’ve seen a man shocked with electric wires stripped from a lamp in order to get him to talk (he also screamed first). I’ve seen a man shot in the knees to, you guessed it, get him to talk (getting people to talk is a top job on “24”).

And all of these nasty acts were committed by Jack Bauer, one of the good guys. The Islamic terrorists Jack was trying to stop were even nastier.

But apparently impressionable kids aren’t going to have their psyches disrupted by watching government agents torture people. If they see Paris Hilton spraying herself with a hose, though, watch out! Who knows what might happen?

Why, as a vegetarian, I’m worried that they could eat more hamburgers. That’s the sort of flesh-peddling that bothers me—selling carcinogenic saturated fat-laden animal carcasses.

May 23, 2005

I’ve taken over getting the morning newspaper when we’re at our cabin in Camp Sherman. This used to be Laurel’s responsibility. She'd drive to the store before going for a walk with Serena, our dog.

But with my new Taoist sensibilities, I figure it’s more real for me to be riding my bike in the cool central Oregon air than sitting on my butt at the kitchen table, waiting for the newspaper to appear, drinking coffee and reading, in a Tao Te Ching book, about the benefits of living more naturally.

It’s a whole two miles to the Camp Sherman store and back. I don’t have to fight the traffic though.

And the roadside signs aren’t too bothersome.

Halfway down the road Mt. Jefferson pops into view. Jeff says to me, "Good morning, Brian. Wouldn't have seen you if you were sitting at the kitchen table."

Then I arrive at the Camp Sherman city center. Today this old car passed me on the road and got to the store just before me. It fit perfectly with the store’s (non-functional) gas pumps. Sorry for the generic term, “old car,” but that’s the best I can do.

While I was taking the photo I was impressed to hear a guy yelling at the driver, “Hey, isn’t that a ’28 or a ’29?” I think the owner replied, “No, it’s a ’30.” Given the evident level of macho car expertise in the Camp Sherman store parking lot, I was reluctant to ask the much more basic question: “Hey, what kind of car is that?”

I love the alphabetically-organized customer account pads behind the counter. They remind me of the Three Rivers Market, the one and only store in Three Rivers, California when my mother and I moved there in 1955. Just like Camp Sherman, if you were a resident you put your purchases on account and paid at the beginning of the month, or when you could.

There’s only a few hundred year-round residents in Camp Sherman. Reminiscing with the store clerk today, I told her that the town where I grew up was similar in that there were lots of tourists around in the summer, but just locals later on.

“If an unfamiliar person walked into the store during the winter,” I said, “the locals would talk about them after they left: ‘Do you know who that was?’”

The clerk told me, “We’re just the same here. Except we flat-out ask them, ‘Who are you?”

In a world where everything seems to be changing, it’s nice to know that small towns aren’t. Stay the same, Camp Sherman. I love you as you are.

May 21, 2005

Laurel and I are finding it difficult to practice Christian compassion. First problem: we’re not Christians. Second problem: it’s hard to be compassionate toward Christians when so many of them act like fools. Case in point, our nation’s Christian-in-Chief, President Bush.

He is threatening to veto legislation that would loosen restrictions on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. Bush calls himself pro-life, but he doesn’t want to promote research that promises cures for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and other degenerative brain and nerve diseases.

Bush’s own Christian compassion is constrained inside the tiny box of Christian fundamentalism, where crazy ideas are free to flower without any inconvenient pruning by facts. The legislation he wants to veto lets government-funded researchers work with embryonic stem cells left over from fertility treatments. These excess embryos either will be discarded, or they will be used in research.

It’s a no-brainer: use them for stem-cell research. But unfortunately Christian right voters do have brains, albeit malfunctioning ones.

Bush is afraid that he’ll lose the political support of fundamentalists who somehow have discovered in the Bible a theological foundation for banning therapeutic cloning, which the Bible never mentions. These, of course, are the same people who criticize the Supreme Court for finding support in the Constitution for allowing abortions, which the Constitution never mentions. Go figure.

My personal theological conclusion is that God must be a Buddhist, notwithstanding the fact that Buddhism doesn’t believe in a personal God (if the Christian right can make outrageous leaps of religious logic, so can I). For evidently God has blessed the predominantly Buddhist nation of South Korea with the leading world expert on cloning human embryos to treat and study disease, Hwang Woo-suk of Seoul National University.

“I want to give humans a gift of healing knowledge,” I picture God saying to herself (my anti-patriarchy wife reads this weblog). “But the United States is filled with too many closed-minded Christians to make wise use of it. So I’ll send a breakthrough in therapeutic cloning to a Buddhist country instead. I love those Buddhists; they don’t try to confine my will within imaginary bounds of their own making.”

More and more it looks like the United States will be getting health care advances from South Korea, consumer items from China, and information technology from India. It kind of makes you want to convert to Buddhism, Taoism, or Hinduism, since fundamentalist Christianity is becoming a foe of modern progress, just like fundamentalist Islam and fundamentalist Judaism.

Those big three Western monotheistic religions have an inbred aversion to seeing reality as it is. By comparison, the big three Eastern pluralistic religions don’t. Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism find it easy to absorb scientific facts into their flexible worldviews. This is one reason the United States is heading downhill, socially and scientifically, while South Korea, China, and India are on the upswing.

I’m pessimistic that things are going to get better in this country so long as Christian groups like the Center for Reclaiming America have so much support among the citizenry. I heard the Center’s founder, D. James Kennedy, interviewed on PBS radio recently. He’s scary. Really scary.

Kennedy believes that this country has to be governed on the basis of Christianity. He sounds just like Islamic fundamentalists who want Koranic law in Muslim countries. Except his Koran is the Bible. Otherwise, you could plunk Kennedy down in Iran or Saudi Arabia and he’d feel right at home.

There’s no room for tolerance in right-wing Christianity. For example, it is obvious that creationism is true and evolution false. Why? Because the Bible tells Kennedy so, and there’s no need to consider inconvenient facts—such as the overwhelming weight of scientific evidence in support of evolution.

Naturally the Center also finds support in scripture for “ending judicial tyranny,” by which Kennedy means that judges should make decisions based on their Christian faith rather than the nation’s laws. Yes, I heard him say this in the PBS interview. He likened judges who rule in support of a woman’s right to have an abortion as being akin to judges in Nazi Germany who supported anti-Jewish German laws.

Again, he’s scary. Really scary.

As is George W. Bush. And everyone else who is trying to make the United States into a Christian nation. The way I see it, what is at risk here is nothing less than reality. Christian fundamentalists want us to close our eyes to truths. Truths about therapeutic cloning. Truths about evolution. Truths about persistent vegetative states. Truths about the big bang. Truths about the genetic basis of homosexuality. All kinds of truths.

Carl Sagan warned some time ago that the demons are beginning to stir. He was right. Now the demons are becoming more active. They have to be defeated. Take a stand: don’t go to church tomorrow. Read a copy of Scientific American instead.

“I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us—then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls.

The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.” [Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science As a Candle in the Dark]

May 19, 2005

It looks like the Corporate Compliance Recorder scam described by the Los Angeles Better Business Bureau has made its way to Oregon. In the mail today I found this official-looking envelope addressed to the non-profit community association that I’m the secretary for.

I believe this is the time our annual corporation fee is due, so at first I thought the mailing was for real. But the $95 fee was steep, and I’d never heard of a requirement to disclose annual minutes.

Of course, there isn’t such a requirement. These scammers on Market Street are hoping that people don’t read the fine print of the other side of their letter, which begins: Corporation Compliance Recorder is a non-governmental service business that assists corporations to avoid possible penalties and fines with state and government agencies.

Aside from taking your $95, it’s hard to figure out what service they provide. Apparently you fill out the form describing the corporation’s annual meeting, then they send you back the information you provided with something like “These are your official minutes” stamped on it. Or whatever. It’s a useless service, regardless.

May 17, 2005

I’m trying to put my problems into perspective. New Scientist magazine is helping me out. The current issue has a great article on the Milky Way galaxy. This is where I live. You too.

When I consider the big picture, really big, of what surrounds us, earthly aggravations look a lot less immense. In my saner moments, I’m able to juxtapose what gripes me with the galactic point of view. Then I see how miniscule are the mole hills that I’ve been regarding as mountains. [All quotes are from the New Scientist article.]

I’m going to be fifty-seven this year. I’m ancient!
“The galaxy’s oldest stars are roughly 13 billion years old, suggesting they formed less than a billion years after the universe began life in a giant explosion 13.7 billion years ago.”

The earth is overpopulated. I feel cramped.
“The Milky Way is a dense disc of stars, gas and dust some 100,000 light years wide.”

If my book doesn’t sell well, I’m a failure, a nothing!
“In total, the Milky Way contains at least 250 billion stars, possibly as many as a trillion.”

It’s crazy that people disagree with how I view the cosmos, since I know so much and I’m so obviously right.
“Compress the whole of human history into just one year, and you will find that it is only in the last four hours that we gleaned the faintest inkling of the geography of the galaxy we inhabit. It was in the 1920s that astronomers realized that our sun and the stars surrounding it form a cosmic island, just one of countless similar islands dotted across the universe.”

I’m afraid my bald spot is getting larger.
“At the heart of the Milky Way lies a monster…a supermassive black hole—a colossal nugget 3 million times as massive as the sun. It is so immense that its gravity prevents anything, including light, escaping from inside a radius of about 7.7 million kilometers, or about twice the distance from Earth to the moon.”

If the Senate eliminates the filibuster rule this week, the United States is doomed.
“The Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy are racing towards each other at a relative speed of 500,000 kilometers every hour, and in 3 billion years’ time, the two giants will run into each other in a catastrophic encounter that will change them both beyond recognition.”

Damn! I’ve gained two pounds.
“Ponder this one next time you make a cup of coffee. If you swapped your teaspoon of sugar for a teaspoon of neutron star innards, it would weigh about a million tonnes.”

We’re wrecking our planet; it’s the only one we have.
“In the Milky Way galaxy as a whole there must be an enormous number of planets…There are billions of planets in our galaxy.”

Sometimes I’m bored with my life. Everything I do seems so familiar.
“Most of the Milky Way is invisible, which has made it all the more difficult to figure out its structure. The motions of stars appear to be influenced by the gravity of vast amounts of mysterious ‘dark matter’ in a giant ball enclosing the galactic disk and bulge.”

My fellow humans, the indisputable fact is that we are small. Very small. And the universe is large. Very large.

If you need more convincing, remember that the Milky Way galaxy is 100,000 light years wide.

Now, let’s further broaden our horizons. Here’s a look at our neighborhood within a billion light years. THis is still just a small part of the entire universe, however. Those clumps aren’t galaxies, or even clusters of galaxies, but clusters of clusters of galaxies—superclusters. It’s estimated there are 3 million large galaxies like the Milky Way within a billion light years.

Recently Laurel and I had been talking about what new businesses we’d like to see in Salem so our quality of life could be improved. We mused, perhaps a Trader Joes? A Whole Foods Market? Or a Middle Eastern restaurant?

We were thinking so inside the box. More precisely, inside such a small box. I realized that when we went to Lowe’s yesterday and passed by the soon-to-open Wal-Mart Supercenter on Turner Road, which is a big box.

When it opens Wednesday it will indeed be super, offering everything that a Salemite could want: general merchandise, groceries, a pharmacy, optical department, hair salon, Tire & Lube Express, and, thank god!, a Murphy’s Take N’ Bake Pizza Store.

Even though we have Toyota and Volvo cars, plus my watch is a Casio and my cell phone a Nokia, I’d been worrying that Laurel and I weren’t doing enough to make sure that the United States’ trade deficit will continue rising to ever higher record levels.

This 3rd Salem Wal-Mart store will make it more convenient for us to buy foreign, and I’m sure our Prius soon will visit the Supercenter parking lot along with lots of Ford and Chevy pickups plastered with American flag decals. Knowing Salem, our patriotic citizens will be eager to step up and help make China’s economy grow even faster.

May 13, 2005

The older I get, the softer I become. And I’m happy about it. Let me hasten to point out that I’m speaking about my martial arts training, not, um, something else.

For nine years I labored in the field of a Shotokan karate dojo. Shotokan is one of the hardest of the hard-styles. I then transplanted myself to the Pacific Martial Arts Academy here in Salem, where, for about four years, I cultivated the mixed-style approach taught by Warren Allen—a blend of karate, jujitsu, aikido, weapons training, and other disciplines.

Now I’ve thrown myself into nurturing the seed of Tai Chi that is beginning to sprout in me. I feel like a baby again, just learning to walk. It’s delightful to explicitly return to what I’ve always been, but didn’t want to admit I was: a beginner.

When I first started training with Warren, I remember being surprised to hear him say: “Tai Chi is the ultimate martial art.” I had never thought of Tai Chi in that way. I considered that it was a rhythmic system of exercise practiced by people in parks who waved their hands around in a graceful fashion that looked good, yet wouldn’t hurt a flea.

It wasn’t long before I changed my mind. Experience will do that to you. Warren began to show me how softness can overcome hardness, just as the Tao Te Ching says. Those forceful linear punches and kicks so much beloved by Shotokan are easily deflected with a gentle circular response.

Plus, I’ve always wondered about the logic of taking self-defense classes where your body gets hurt. Isn’t the idea of self-defense to defend yourself? Even with the mixed-style I’ve pursued the past few years, I started to see that I was losing flexibility in my shoulders because of the forceful joint locks that kept getting applied in training. At the age of 56, my body wasn’t quickly bouncing back to normal the way it used to after being abused.

When I would go to Shotokan karate seminars, often I’d see high-ranking black belts who had been training for thirty years or more hobble around. Their knees and other important body parts were in bad shape after enduring hard impacts in Shotokan classes and competition. I could see that I was heading in the same direction, albeit less emphatically.

So I’ve become a Tai Chi neophyte. I’m coming to realize why another black belt in the Pacific Martial Arts Academy likes to say, “I’d learn Tai Chi but it’s too damn difficult.” You can’t fake lack of coordination, poor balance, bad posture, inflexibility, or lack of body control when you’re moving at the pace of a snail. That’s why I feel like a baby. It quickly dawned on me that after thirteen years of marital arts training, I don’t know how to take one step.

I know the short 24 form. Outwardly. Inwardly, I can’t do a single move. I mean, you can go through the motions of Tai Chi and not really be doing Tai Chi. Some of the advanced students in Warren’s Tai Chi classes have been pointing that out to me. I’ll perform some Tai Chi posture and they’ll say, “Yes, that’s how you do it. But you lost your root.” Which means, really, you aren’t doing it. They’re just being gentle with me, the Tai Chi way. I reply, “I couldn’t tell that I had lost my root, because I don’t know what it is to have my root.”

They show me. I can see that they have it. And I don’t. When I ask how you get it, I’ll be told: “Imagine that your energy is passing downward through your feet all the way to the center of the Earth, where it wraps itself around a (conveniently located) metal pole. Now it is immovable. That’s your root.”

I think: “Gee, that sounds easy. All I have to do is send my energy to the center of the Earth and wrap it around a pole. Should be able to learn how to do that in just, oh, a dozen years or so. Patience, Grasshopper, patience.”

May 11, 2005

Here's a depiction of the Blogmobile concept car, courtesy of the April 4, 2005 The New Yorker. The driver kind of looks like me. Given how much time I spend on my weblogs, my wife probably would say "It is you!"

The story, “Expert says state drought just a blip,” shows that Taylor is still going around spreading disinformation about the reality of global warming. He was quoted as saying, “We don't really understand climate. (The data) doesn't say humans don't have an effect, obviously they do. But we don't know what it means.”

Yes, if meteorologists can’t accurately forecast the weather ten days from now, they obviously can’t predict how human-caused global warming will have changed the Earth ten years from now. But when George Taylor says “We don’t know what it means,” his unstated message is “We shouldn’t do anything about it,” notwithstanding his reported statement that reduction of fossil-fuel use would be a good move.

The Kyoto Protocol is the world’s primary commitment to addressing the problems of human-caused global warming. George Taylor worked to keep the Kyoto Protocol from going into effect.

The protocol needed to be approved by countries responsible for at least fifty-five percent of the industrialized world’s carbon dioxide emissions. Since the United States accounts for thirty-four percent and withdrew from Kyoto negotiations in 2001, virtually every other major industrialized nation needed to approve the protocol or it would collapse.

OISM’s head-in-the-sand scientific style is evident from the publication published by the Institute, “Nuclear War Survival Skills.” You also can buy Nuclear War Survival Skill DVDs that promise you’ll learn about “shelter construction and ventilation, water purification, food preparation, radiation monitoring and many other life-saving procedures - these essential survival skills are performed just as they would be to save lives in a real nuclear emergency.”

Surviving the effects of global warming must seem like a piece of cake to the folks at OISM since they are so optimistic about living through nuclear war. Global warming skeptics like they and George Taylor like to focus on the uncertainties of the science underlying the Kyoto Protocol rather than what is known for sure. I assume that they don’t think there is any problem with Social Security either, because it isn’t possible to forecast the exact year it won’t be possible to pay out full benefits.

As Elizabeth Kolbert writes in her excellent three-part series in The New Yorker, “The Climate of Man" (parts I and II currently are online), “In legitimate scientific circles, it is virtually impossible to find evidence of disagreement over the fundamentals of global warming.”

Kolbert quotes Robert Socolow, co-director of the Carbon Mitigation Initiative funded by BP and Ford:

“I’ve been involved in a number of fields where there’s a lay opinion and a scientific opinion. And in most of the cases, it’s the lay community that is more exercised, more anxious. If you take an extreme example, it would be nuclear power, where most of the people who work in nuclear science are relatively relaxed about very low levels of radiation. But in the climate case, the experts—the people who work with the climate models every day, the people who do ice cores—they are more concerned. They’re going out of their way to say, ‘Wake up! This is not a good thing to be doing.’”

Yet here in Oregon our state climatologist is going around giving talks where he tries to put people to sleep, assuring them that natural cycles are mostly responsible for global warming and that this state’s current drought is “nothing more than a blip in the long-term history of the area’s climate.” That’s irresponsible. It would be irresponsible if Taylor was speaking just for himself. It is doubly irresponsible when he speaks as Oregon’s climatologist.

Halfway across the world, “Australia's Greenhouse Gas Scientists Declare Climate Emergency.” But Oregon’s climatologist says, “No worries, mate.” A Business Week cover story says, “Consensus is growing among scientists, governments, and business that they must act fast to combat climate change. This has already sparked efforts to limit CO2 emissions. Many companies are now preparing for a carbon-constrained world.” But Oregon’s climatologist says, “Not to worry.”

Optimism is wonderful. Unless it blinds you to reality.

Here’s how Elizabeth Kolbert ends her series in The New Yorker:

“No matter what we do at this point, global temperatures will continue to rise in the coming decades, owing to the gigatons of extra carbon dioxide already circulating in the atmosphere. With more than six billion people on the planet, the risks of this are obvious. A disruption in monsoon patterns, a shift in ocean currents, a major drought—any one of these could easily produce streams of refugees numbering in the millions. As the effects of global warming become more and more apparent, will we react by finally fashioning a global response? Or will we retreat into ever narrower and more destructive forms of self-interest? It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.”

May 09, 2005

Last month I was excited to receive an ultimate rejection letter from Beacon Press. Like most writers I’m a connoisseur of rejection letters. Since I’ve received so many, I figure I might as well appreciate them.

I’d sent a copy of my book, “Return to the One,” off to Beacon Press, The University of Chicago Press, and the State University of New York Press. I told them that on Amazon it was currently the #1 best selling title about the Greek mystic philosopher Plotinus. And this was with very minimal publicity/promotion.

I candidly admitted that I’d probably been wrong to publish “Return to the One” in a POD (print on demand) fashion. As good as the book is, most reviewers won’t even consider reviewing it because it’s tainted with the dreaded POD Mark of the Beast: Unclean! It's self-published! Quick, cast this work of the literary devil into the trash!

Most rejection letters include boilerplate language like “Although your work would no doubt be of interest to many…” (U of C Press) and “Your project seems to us to be an important one…” (SUNY Press).

Gee, guys, if it’s interesting to so many and so important, why don’t you publish it?! Oh, I forgot. You’re just trying to soften the smack of the rejection letter.

Beacon Press, on the other hand, didn’t mess around with any niceties. They sent me this postcard.

Which, when I turned it over, contained this message.

So beautiful. Nothing. A marvelous rejection letter literary device. I could make up my own rejectory language:

“Mr. Hines, we have read every word of your book with great enthusiasm. Truly, you have written a masterpiece. Sadly, we consider Beacon Press unworthy to publish such a work of genius. You deserve so much better than us. We could never live with ourselves if our acceptance of ‘Return to the One’ prevented it from being published by the most prestigious book company in the world. Hopefully you won’t mind that we have forwarded your book to ________ with our highest commendations, whom we expect you’ll be hearing from soon.”

Of course, another possibility is that Beacon Press’ rejection card printer ran out of ink at an inopportune moment. And it could even be that the back of the card was intended to say, “We are very much interested in publishing your book. Please contact us immediately to discuss the terms of our generous agreement.”

I suppose I should write Beacon Press and ask them to send me a non-blank card. But I’ve gotten attached to the nothingness of what I now have. I don’t think that I’m ever going to get a more Zen rejection notice. Maybe it’s time to quit while I’m behind.

May 08, 2005

Here’s a contrarian Mother’s Day story about the one hour I spent with my father. Note: the one hour, period. This wasn’t the best or worst hour, nor the happiest or saddest hour. It was the only hour I spent face-to-face with him.

Well, not counting a bunch of hours when I was a baby that I can’t remember. These are the only photos that I have of my father, John Hines. They always have been part of my Baby Book. I used to stare at them a lot when I was a kid, wondering what my father was like.

My mother never talked much about him. They were divorced in October 1952 when I was four. But they split up quite a while before that. I have no memory of my father other than that one hour, which I’ll get to in a little bit.

I don’t think about my father much. I don’t have much to think about. He came to mind recently because Friday I found an envelope in a filing cabinet that Laurel and I were cleaning out. Mice had gotten into the cabinet and shredded quite a bit of paper. Fortunately the envelope that I had gotten from my mother’s things after she died in 1985 was still mostly intact.

A clipping of her engagement to my father was in the envelope. It was the second marriage for both of them. This one only lasted five years. My mother had kept the probate court divorce declaration also. The cause was “that the libellee [my father] being of sufficient ability, has grossly wantonly and cruelly refused and neglected to provide suitable maintenance for said libellant [my mother] and their minor children [me and my sister, Evie].” Ouch.

Evie, my mother told me, was the reason they got divorced. She was born with a congenital heart condition. My father supposedly refused to move from Massachusetts to a drier climate where, the doctors said, she’d do better. He didn’t want to leave his job. My mother moved to Texas and stayed with my grandmother anyway. Good for her. Sadly, Evie died anyway.

My father was supposed to pay $50 a month to support me. He never sent a dime, at least during the time I was old enough to know whether he did or not. He also never sent me a line—no letters, no phone calls, no visits. Every Christmas I’d get a card from him with a check for a small amount of money. The card would be signed, “John.” Not “Dad” or “Your father.” No “Love” either. Just “John.”

So those were my memories of my father until my thirties. Two photos and a few laconically signed Christmas cards. I wanted more, naturally.

Divorce was very uncommon in the 1950s. I think I was the only kid in my elementary school whose parents were divorced. I wasn’t religious, but I did talk a lot to God in my room at night asking him, “Why don’t I have a father like my friends?”

My mother enrolled me in Boy Scouts and sent me to YMCA summer camp for some male influence. The first question boys would ask at camp, once everyone was settled in their cots, was “What does your father do?” I remember lying in my cot petrified as the question circled the room and was answered by camper after camper. I had no idea what to say. It was unthinkable to admit that I didn’t have a father.

My best friend bailed me out with a distracting joke at just the right time. I’ve never thanked him for this until now: if you read weblogs, Kenny Hart (you probably go by “Ken” now), bless you for being so sensitive.

When I was in my early thirties I picked up the phone one evening and heard, “Hi. This is John, your father.” Hmmmm. Okay. So? He did most of the talking. I could tell right away that he was much more interested in telling me about himself, than in learning about me and my family. That figured. The way he abandoned my mother and me, I didn’t have him pegged for a saint.

My father was sick. He had emphysema. Apparently he wanted to do some long distance conversing with his son before he got sicker. He told me a lot about himself. I don’t know how much to believe. A genius IQ? Maybe. One of the country’s top computer experts and a NASA consultant? Maybe. A founder of a high tech company, Systems and Computer Technology Corporation? Certainly—he sent me some stock in recompense for all those years of not paying child support.

A kick-ass efficiency expert for General Electric? Yes, I confirmed that later, during my one hour with him. Let’s see, what else? He said that he was adopted by the Hines’ and put a lot of work into researching his family history. He found out that his parents were Polish speaking Germans who came to this country early in the 1900s to work on the railroad. His mother died giving birth to him. His father cut and ran. Like father, like son.

At the time he told me about being a co-founder of Systems and Computer Technology Corporation, I had recently become a Ph.D. dropout after completing two years of coursework in a Systems Science doctoral program. I couldn’t help thinking, ‘Like father, like son.” But I didn’t want to be like my father. Yet, obviously in some ways I was.

What little my mother told me about John Hines was along the lines of, “He was an ex-Marine, tall, good-looking, a fine writer, charming.” Also, a jerk. I didn’t mind associating myself with the 50% of my genetic heritage that had positive qualities. But it began to creep me out the more my father would phone and ramble on about his life. I started to realize that, as the saying goes, I was cut from the same cloth—or at least half of the cloth—but had just unfolded in a different way, owing to other influences.

During one of our conversations I told him that I was going to attend a Systems Dynamics computer modeling seminar at M.I.T. He was staying in a Boston hotel and getting treated at a local hospital. I agreed to meet him at his hotel the afternoon before the seminar started.

Most people have spent lots of time with their fathers. A few people never have seen their fathers because of adoption or death. I haven’t heard of anyone like me who got to spend just a single hour with his or her father. As you can imagine, I was nervous walking down the hotel corridor to his room. I knocked.

My half-brother, Mike, opened the door. Apparently my father needed some support during this visit. John walked up to me and shook my hand. We didn’t hug or anything. No tears of joy. Nothing that you see in the movies. Real life isn’t like the movies.

What is real life like? Real life is having one hour in your life face-to-face with your father, and spending that time looking at General Electric manuals that he had arranged on the bed prior to my arrival, efficiently opened up to pages that he wanted to impress me with.

I sat down on the edge of the bed. I dutifully thumbed my way through manual after manual, listening to my father’s stories about how he went into GE plants that were having problems and got them back up to speed. “What the hell?” I kept thinking to myself. “If this is how my father wants to spend his time with his long-ignored son, so be it.”

We got through all of the manuals. I shook his hand again. When the door shut behind me and I started walking down the corridor to my rented car, I was so happy. Not happy that I had finally gotten to meet my father—happy that I would never have to see my father again.

Which I never did.

Moral to this story? If there is one, it’s that fantasies aren’t reality and what you get in life often is better than what you want in life. Growing up, I wanted my father. When I was grown up, that one hour with him taught me that I was hugely better off fatherless. I’m already too much like him. If I had grown up with him, I might have become him.

That’s too scary to think about. Time for a mind-cleansing nap, hopefully with fatherless dreams.

May 06, 2005

Laurel, avid animal lover that she is, can’t resist messing around with natural selection. Today she put up this sign at our nearby Spring Lake, warning people that a wild duck, or mallard, has chosen to lay her eggs in a highly public spot (maybe she’s an exhibitionist).

Before showing you the nest, I want to point out the professional quality of this sign. It’s good to know that, if all else fails, we can always open up a sign shop. Laurel contributed the printing, the UPS man brought us the cardboard, and I thought of the protective cling wrap. Result: a warning sign that will last for the ages, or at least until the next heavy rain.

Laurel also put up the stakes that mark the nest’s location. You can see that it is just a few feet from the rocky top of Spring Lake’s earthen dam, across which people, dogs, and horses frequently walk. The nest is barely visible midway between the stakes.

Here’s a close-up of the six eggs. I hope that the ducklings are able to hatch and waddle their way across the rocks and into the lake (probably quacking all the way, “Damn it, Mom! Why did you have to nest on the side of the rocks away from the water?! My feet hurt! When are we going to get there?! I need to go potty!)

Nature probably intends that ducks who don’t have the good sense to nest in a safe place shouldn’t have babies with the same genetic predisposition. But Laurel also is part of nature, and she’ll do her best to help out Mommy Mallard.

It seems that long-awaited cracks are starting to appear in what used to be monolithic Republican support for conservative policies. Republicans with a libertarian, small-government bent (Shepard Smith seems to be in this group) are beginning to resist the social control, Christian right side of the party that wants to strengthen governmental powers.

Thus I found these Fox News snippets to be interesting reflections of divisions in the conservative ranks that likely will widen. First, here’s my DVR-aided transcript of the cheerleading story:

Shepard Smith: “The Texas state House has approved the so-called ‘booty bill.’ The bill restricts ‘overly suggestive cheerleading.’ Its sponsor says that the performances are a distraction for students, resulting in pregnancies, dropouts, and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.”

Then a clip was shown of the above-mentioned sponsor, Rep. Al Edwards, (who is a Democrat, but the state House has a majority of Republicans) saying, “We cannot afford to exploit our young girls the way we are.”

Smith: “Good Lord! Critics of the bill say it is unnecessary since Texas bans lewd acts in public places anyway and some are questioning the government’s priorities here.”

End of story. Smith begins to speak spontaneously to a network colleague after a several second silent quizzical look.

Second, here’s some excerpts from the more substantive border fence story that featured Fox News Senior Judicial Analyst Andrew Napolitano:

Judge Andrew Napolitano: After talking about the driver’s license provision of the Real ID act, he said, “There is other language in this bill that is frightening…The same bill says to the Secretary of Homeland Security, build a fence between Texas and Mexico. You may suspend any federal law you may like that interferes with your building that fence.

Shepard Smith: What?”

Napolitano: “And no judge in any court in America may review your suspension of that law. That makes the Secretary of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff, the king if he can suspend any law he wants. This has never happened before in American history.”

Smith (sarcastically): “So we have a king now. That’s good. I knew things were changing. You can feel it.”

Napolitano: “First the cheerleaders in Texas and now the king in Washington, D.C.

Smith: “There’s the problem. The judge has told you there is a king in Washington, D.C.”

Napolitano: “You’re exactly right. Our listeners and viewers need to know what the government is doing—with no debate about this in the House or Senate. They are about to enact the legislation that lets one person in Washington, the Secretary of Homeland Security, suspend any law he wants and prohibits any judge from reviewing that act of suspension. We’ve never had such legislation in our history.”

Smith: “Frightening. That’s frightening.”

Shepard Smith and Judge Napolitano then talked about the Texas cheerleading story.

Smith: “They are telling people what they can and cannot do with their clothed bodies. And then they’re not giving a definition for what ‘suggestive’ is. It is in the eye of the beholder, said the Texas state House representative from whom you heard earlier."

Napolitano: “Government should not be telling people how to express and what to look at, and what not to look at…. What will they regulate next in Texas?

Smith: “I don’t know. Maybe the color of your shoes. Maybe what your roof has to be made out of. Maybe the color of the person you can marry. Maybe we’ll go back to that too.

Napolitano: “Government has to recognize that it has limits. And morality comes from within, not enforced from without.”

Right on, Fox News. For once you really were fair and balanced in your reporting.

May 03, 2005

Yesterday Laurel and I felt sorry for ourselves. You probably won’t feel sorry for us. But then, you’re not us. If you were us, pretty obviously you’d feel like just us. And even though you’re you and we are ourselves, I bet you’ve engaged in some similar feeling-sorryness that appears ridiculous to anyone else but you.

Here’s the deal: wanting knows no bounds. I realize this philosophically. The Buddha clearly explained how desire leads to suffering, and I’ve read my share of Buddhist books. But it isn’t until I’m face to face with a concrete example of how my wanting expands to fit the space available to it (which seemingly is infinite) that I really grasp what a trap I’m in. Laurel too. All of us, except the few with Buddha nature.

This is the view from the deck of the Camp Sherman cabin that we just came back from. We share ownership of the cabin with three other families. It sits on leased national forest service land on the banks of the Metolius River.

In 1997 we were fortunate to learn about a ¼ share of the cabin being put up for sale. At the time a Coldwell Banker realtor in Sisters told us that in the seven years he had been with the firm only one forest service cabin had been listed publicly, and he had never seen a partial share made available. These Metolius River cabins generally are passed down from generation to generation in a family, treasured assets that they are.

Laurel and I love the cabin. We love Camp Sherman. We love the Metolius River. And yet, we feel sorry for ourselves because we don’t have a direct view of the river like lots of other cabins do.

Whenever we walk to the cabin at the very end of the Metolius River trail, nearest to the head of the Metolius (which issues full-blown from a large spring), we envy the view those owners have from their deck. “They’re so lucky to have a view of the river,” we say. “We just look at trees. Poor us.”

I know, I know. This sounds ridiculous. It is ridiculous. But that’s how the human mind works: it always wants more, even when it has a lot.

Here’s a Calcutta street scene. I’m pretty sure most of the people who live in Calcutta wouldn't feel sorry for us if they knew that we have to look at just trees from inside the cabin rather than trees and the river. And yet, I’m willing to bet that if a Calcutta slum dweller were to be transplanted to our Camp Sherman cabin, within a few years he or she would be walking the river trail thinking just like us: “Oh, how nice it would be to have a better view.”

Well, I meditate every morning, as does Laurel. We await our enlightenments, the end of our never-ending wantings. For now, we make do with who we are.

I’ve taken to carrying a lounge chair the 100 feet or so from our cabin to the river, naturally feeling sorry for myself the whole way as I try to balance a chair and cushions in one hand, and a glass of juice, magazines, paperback book, and highlighter in the other. It’s a tough life.

I stagger with my load to the bank of the Metolius and settle in. Looking around, it’s a nice view. I can’t see it from our cabin—boo-hoo!—but they say that suffering is good for the soul.

I vow to endure, somehow, as I sip my cranberry juice and listen to the rushing water. Somewhere in Calcutta a street urchin is searching for food in a pile of trash. And I'm feeling sorry for myself.

May 01, 2005

Reporting from the shores of the Metolius River in Camp Sherman, Oregon, just a few hundred yards from the head of the Metolius, and just a few hours late (hey, I’m on Camp Sherman time):

Nobody is on the trails.
Except two people and a dog.
One of whom (not the dog) says that walking traffic is flowing freely.
Just like the rain.
Cool 53 degrees rain.
And that’s your Metolius River traffic and weather report.
5:30 pm, May 1, 2005.